coarsest character. . . June 11, 1871, I went to my office. ...to write my letters...on leaving the office I was joined by a young friend, Mr Virgil Conn. As we proceeded down the street towards the post office I saw the brothers standing talking on the street. . . I saw at once it was to be a fight. . .
He was, he went on to write, wounded in the neck, the bullet lodging back of his eye. Also, as he tells it, he was hit with a cane and shot several other times. He returned the fire, seriously wounding one of the brothers (H. R.) Thompson's condition was so serious that noted surgeon, Dr. Sharpies, was summoned from Eugene to attend him. H. R. Gale died in 1889, never having regained his strength after the shooting.
Thompson was then only 23 years old. Recovering slowly from his wounds, he sold the paper February 1872, to L. F. Mosher, who soon associated with him John W. Kelly. Thompson then went to Salem and published the Mercury.
The Plaindealer (later the Umpqua Valley News) became Republican recalled by 1874 and so continued. The Plaindealer is recalled by L. Wimberly, old-time publisher of the Roseburg Review,30 as a powerful political paper in the 80's.
The Independent was the successor of the Ensign and the Pantograph, appearing in April, 1875, under the direction of John W. Kelly, newspaper man from Walla Walla, Boise, LaGrande, Portland, and Salem. It was a four-page paper, eight columns, for which the publisher charged $3 a year. Kelly was a strong writer and well versed in the so-called "Oregon style." He could, as Mr. Wimberly remembers, "burn 'em up when he felt so inclined." This paper was the forerunner of the Roseburg Review. Thus we have here already the two ancestors of the present News-Review—the Plaindealer and the Independent. The Independent, Walling says,31 "was sold to the Democrats in 1882."
The publishers of the Plaindealer include some well-known figures in Oregon journalism—besides Thompson, Kelly and his partner L. F. Mosher there were W. A. McPherson (1874) and W. H. Byars, who came the next year and remained for several years. Both McPherson and Byars were prominent in Salem journalism—McPherson as publisher of the Statesman in the more or less difficult days following the departure of Asahel Bush from the paper, and Byars as publisher of first the Statesman and later the Capital Journal in Salem. Under Byars the Plaindealer ran its first daily edition from February to April, 1879.
Another Roseburg paper of the late seventies was the Western Star, Democratic, started by C. L. Mosher in 1877. The paper32 "went broke, and its former opponents got its type and machinery." Walling gave up the job of tracing out all the Roseburg papers
